An old Bengali saying has it that the streets of Calcutta are flooded if a cat pees. That is probably true of most Indian cities which the British created for much smaller populations living with adequate civic facilities in very different circumstances. The cities have grown haphazardly since then, somehow accommodating – not catering to –– exponentially increasing numbers without any attention to the quality of life or even basic needs.
Mumbai’s mammoth traffic jams are one result of improvidence. Kolkata’s squalid slums are another. Chennai’s crippling floods, whose cost in terms of lives lost, the spread of disease, damage to property and nationwide economic dislocation is yet to be assessed or admitted, is a third result of the unplanned urbanisation of the capital of what many say is India’s fastest-urbanising state. Kolkata, too, has faced a similar peril ever since the natural marshes of the Salt Lakes to the east of the city were drained to create Salt Lake City. Many of the canals along the road to the airport have also been filled in to become car parks or pander to the chief minister’s passion for beautification so that we have flocks of wild horses and other statuary and even an imitation of the clock tower and Big Ben from London’s Houses of Parliament instead of natural drainage.
It has long been a truism that the building industry is the only industry to flourish in West Bengal. It is booming because its proprietors are provided with cheap land and easy licences and permits. In return they are believed to fund the ruling Trinamool Congress just as they did the CPI(M) during 34 years of Left Front rule. The forests of multistoried condominiums they build add to every municipal burden. In my Kolkata street, for instance, 20 bungalows each housing just a single family have been replaced by 20 blocks of flats which each house at least 50 families. Imagine the pressure on water, sewage, drainage, electricity and every other civic amenity.
Our cities have not kept pace with our population growth or the revolution of rising expectations. The British built Calcutta, Bombay and Madras for their own commercial and administrative needs. Renaming them does not wipe out history, or turn them into authentic Indian creations.
Matters are obviously not very different in Tamil Nadu. In Chennai, this has encouraged collusion between politicians, sycophantic civil servants and greedy construction companies callously to violate building rules and safety regulations. Successive state governments have for years now only nominally implemented a series of orders by the Supreme Court and Madras High Court on urban building law violations, particularly in Chennai’s commercial areas. It remains to be seen now whether a court-induced investigation of land-use violations, on the lines of the Sahayam Committee, which the High Court appointed, would be able to remedy the situation.
Of course, there is often no remedy from what the law calls acts of god. The rains were heavier this year and more prolonged. Districts like Cuddalore and Kancheepuram, and much of the rest of Tamil Nadu, with the exception of such western districts as Coimbatore, Salem, etc., suffered heavy rains for three weeks before the floods made national news. As in previous years for decades now, the northern suburbs and districts of Chennai were inundated for weeks before attracting general attention. But it doesn’t appear to have been noticed that locals also blamed the flooding on the repeated and unannounced opening of sluice gates that emptied lake water into the Adyar river that flows through the smarter and more expensive southern parts of the city. The earlier rains cutting off the city’s IT corridor did not cause the same media stir.
A major complaint in Chennai was the absence of an effective information service that could have alerted people to the danger looming ahead and enabled them to make some preparation to escape its worst rigours. Without such a warning system, the city’s police force, fire brigade, and electricity and water supply maintenance staff were in no position to spring to the rescue with their vehicles and equipment. Many of them were also marooned in their waterlogged homes, and eye witnesses record that only scavengers were at work. A third grievance refers to the poor maintenance of Tamil Nadu’s state-owned fleet of buses and trucks, as well as of electricity sub-stations and supply-lines. The authorities will no doubt plead inadequate funds but while there may be some truth in this defence, it is compounded by corruption at all levels.
A Kolkata contractor once told me of an arrangement with the municipal inspectors so that they measured the depth of the tarmac on a stretch of road that had been repaired only in the spots agreed to mutually. That way shoddy work was not detected, contractors’ bills were paid in full, inspectors assured of their cut, and the same repairs became necessary year after year. Things can’t be very different in Chennai. An earlier government order forbidding local communities to de-silt lakes, tanks and canals in the neighbourhood (apparently to prevent caste and communal conflict) is also blamed.
Underlying all this is the stark fact that our cities have not kept pace with our population growth or the revolution of rising expectations. The British built Calcutta, Bombay and Madras for their own commercial and administrative needs, just as they built New Delhi to flesh out their imperial pretensions. Renaming the three former presidency towns Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai does not wipe out history, or turn them into authentic Indian creations. In times past, these cities had their unofficially demarcated European and Indian areas. The demarcation still exists but rich Indians now occupy the old European areas.
I have no objection to that but what it means in practice is that the old elitism continues, with civic services catering only to the favoured few. Road surfaces are broken elsewhere. Potable water is a rare luxury. Power cuts are frequent even where electricity lines have been laid. Public transport is neither smooth nor regular. Sanitation is often virtually unknown despite the present Central government’s highly publicised plans. Drainage and sewage are major problems. Thanks to an inadequate supply of water to flush them out, Chennai’s sewage discharge lines are clogged for months on end. An attempt to wash out the drainage system with pumped sea water was apparently abandoned because of fears that saline water would seep into the sub-soil and contaminate drinking water sources. In the absence of any alternative scheme, the drains remain blocked.
In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, the West refashioned the countryside in the image of its cities. Because of poor maintenance and insufficient attention to future needs, the cities that independent India inherited are sadly deteriorating into villages even while our politicians talk bombastically of e-governance and smart cities. The only answer lies in massive investment in urban regeneration.
